Validation & Testing

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Tested & Proven

Dynamic Air Shelters are tested and proven to keep your workforce safe and out of harm’s way on sites with inherent hazards. Simply put, they avert disaster and save more lives.

Lightweight relocatable shelters (LRS) such as tents, trailers and pre-fabricated shelters are intended for rapid deployments to the field. The main purpose is usually to provide protection from the weather for personnel or equipment.

However, these shelters are often placed where they are at risk from blast or ballistic threats, including terrorist bombings, accidental explosions, extreme winds, or seismic action, such as earthquake aftershocks. Their design criteria are focused more on a shelter’s transport ability, weight and the ease and speed of set up, rather than on the need for protection – making these other shelters highly vulnerable to blast.

Ironically, in catastrophic events it is most often the shelter itself that inflicts the worst injury on occupants. In blast events, occupants are commonly injured by the impact or projection of the hard framing or hard sheathing of the shelter.

This high injury risk became painfully evident In the BP Texas City explosion in 2005 in which there were 15 fatalities, all occupants of office trailers.

Following that tragic event, Dynamic Risk developed a blast-resistant air beam shelter system to offer protection from industrial explosions, military weapons and IED threats. The system consists of a low-pressure (1.5 – 2.0 psig) air beam support structure, a heavy-duty waterproof fabric shell and liner, and a flexible, move-able, geotextile exterior, with ballistic and blast barrier surrounding the perimeter of the shelter.

Tested and tested again

Six live field explosive tests were performed between 2007 and 2011 and conducted with the help of our testing partners:

Key Findings

The shelter was subjected to a vapor cloud explosion (VCE) blast load with a blast wave shape, pressure, and duration similar to the VCE blast loads generated by accidental VCEs at chemical processing and petroleum refining facilities.

No air columns were damaged or rapidly deflated. There was temporary deformation, but the columns returned to their normal shape quickly

The shelter remained functional, and allowed occupants to safely exit

The doors remained functional

Air columns that form the roof deflected downward during the test, but did not intrude into the primary habitable space and returned to their initial position in less than two seconds

While some anchors broke (this component failure does not have a negative effect on personnel safety), the shelter remained standing

The shelter was subjected to a blast from a 2000kg TNT-equivalent charge at 100m standoff, yielding an incident blast wave of 30.6kPa amplitude, 45ms positive-phase duration, and 570kPa-ms impulse.

The shelter rebounded fully from the blast after deflecting in a mode of elastic buckling

The air-beam columns intruded minimally into the habitable internal space at their maximum deflection

The wall deflection would not have inflicted serious impact injuries

The pressure transmitted to the interior was significantly diminished. The degree of amplitude reduction increased with blast strength to 50 percent for the strongest blast; impulse reduction decreased with incident blast strength from 38 percent to 28 percent. The stronger the blast, the higher the amplitude reduction

See how Dynamic Air Shelters perform in a blast situation

With several years of research and development behind our blast-resistant shelters and tactical shelter systems, Dynamic Air Shelters creates protective shelter solutions for the most challenging conditions on earth. Contact us to discuss your requirements for keeping your personnel safe where inherent hazards exist.

Dynamic Air Shelters engineers and manufactures lightweight, rapidly deployable textile shelters and constructions to protect people and equipment from extreme hazards in harsh environments.